meetings

The facilitators role

If you’re facilitating the daily coordination meeting (standup, daily scrum, whatever you want to call it), and you’re doing all the talking, then you’re doing it wrong.

With retrospectives, we generally have specific formats that we follow, rather than just pulling people together and expecting them to talk. This feels very counter-intuitive for many; surely we don’t need rules or formats to get people to come up with creative ideas. Yet doing that will dramatically improve the results we get.

Social proof in meetings

I’ve been in quite a few meetings recently where people are speaking in a passive voice, and saying things like “maybe someone could do this thing”. Naturally nobody does.

My people aren’t participating

I frequently hear “my people won’t speak up during standup” or “they aren’t participating in retro” or other activities. Unfortunately, there are many different reasons why this might be so it’s not a simple problem to fix. Step one is to figure out why this might be happening.

“This is a safe space”

I’m seeing more and more situations where someone will say “this is a safe space” in a meeting invite or at the beginning of a session. While I appreciate that the person saying the words really wants that to be true, the fact they feel the need to say it, highlights the fact that it probably isn’t. If it really were safe, we would already know that.

Six Thinking Hats Retrospective

Six Thinking Hats is an approach for creativity that was created by Edward DeBono. I use it as the basis for an agile retrospective, and find this approach to be particularly effective when the topic we’re discussing is expected to be controversial or heated.

Improving meetings

When we look for opportunities for improvement, at some point every team will bring up meetings as being an ongoing problem for them. When we dig into what the actual problems are, we find they always fall into one of three categories:

What’s wrong with the common Scrum questions?

Each day during standup, most teams will have every answer three questions. The questions most commonly asked are fairly poor and result in a undesirably bad meeting.

Improving the daily coordination meeting

Just about all agile methods have some kind of a daily coordination meeting. It might be called a standup or a daily coordination meeting or a daily scrum or any number of other things. The point is that this meeting is focused on actively managing the work and it’s frequently done poorly.

Retrospective Magic

The content from this workshop has been expanded and turned into the video course Retrospective Magic.

Putting the Moose on the Table: A LEGO based retrospective

In order for teams to step into high performance. it’s critical that they develop the practice of having effective conversations about what is and isn’t working. Yet in practice, the retrospective meeting is often the least-valued of the agile events: team members feel that their retros are boring, repetitive, and superficial.